News
The Vanderbilt University building on the ruins of the California College of the Arts will bear the billionaire’s name
The New Art and Design of San Francisco from Vanderbilt University campus will bear the name of Nvidia co-founder Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang after the billionaire pledged millions to the institution.
The university announced this week that the AI chipmaker and his wife Lori Huang have donated $75 million to establish the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design.
The controversial campus will replace the nearly 120-year-old California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco’s last remaining private arts college. The beloved nonprofit organization, which awards bachelor’s and master’s degrees in several artistic disciplines, was purchased by Vanderbilt amid financial problems caused by declining enrollment and a growing budget deficit.
The Huangs made a matching gift of $22.5 million to CCA in February 2025 to help stabilize the institution’s shaky finances. Less than a full year later, however, CCA announced that it would cease operations after the 2026-2027 academic year and that the Potrero Hill campus would become part of Vanderbilt.
Not everyone in the local arts community is happy with Huang’s donation. “These billionaires would much rather play God and remake our art schools in their own image than support a 120-year-old legacy art school,” Lindsey White, a San Francisco-based artist, teacher and CCA alum, told me. Hyperallergic.
“In both CCA and SFAI cases, billionaires with no experience in the arts have taken over major real estate, leaving local artists, educators and workers in a dystopian nightmare,” White continued. “Unfortunately, it appears that our local government also did not see the value in saving the last art school in Northern California.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom had pushed to secure a $20 million government grant through 2025 to keep the private institution afloat, despite significant opposition from state lawmakers. At the time, the governor argued that while it was atypical for the government to fund a private university, the state should fund CCA to protect the cultural sector amid Trump’s attacks on the arts. He later expressed shock at the school’s closure, but critics said he should have seen it coming.
Huang co-founded Nvidia, a manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs) now widely used to power artificial intelligence programs, in a Denny’s restaurant stand in 1993. In May, the chipmaker reached a valuation of $5.5 trillion, the highest in the history of publicly traded companies.
According to the university’s announcement, the Huangs donated the large amount out of their belief that “creative practice.” [is] one of the most essential engines of innovation.”
“Technology expands what we can build,” Jensen Huang said in the press release issued earlier this week. “Art and design determine why we build it. Together they shape civilization.”
In an op-ed about the closure of CCA in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, local gallerist Griff Williams warned that “corporate interests seem to be overshadowing everything else in San Francisco.”
“Mayor Lurie, the closure of the California College of the Arts is a tragedy for the city, not one ‘win,‘he wrote. “It’s another blow to the legacy of the heroes who made San Francisco unique: Joan Brown, David Ireland, Bruce Conner, Hung Liu, Hank Willis Thomas, Dewey Crumpler, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Harrell Fletcher, Jim Goldberg, Viola Frey, Ted Purves, Dodie Bellamy and Susan O’Malley, to name a few.”
